Hello Unusually Curious

July 17, 2011

Welcome to my art rantings. Said rantings will center around art, digital art, freelancing, and all the tools used for such endeavors. I will post doodles and finished freelance stuff to accompany rants – or just for the heck of it – because this is my rant blog 🙂

Below is a recent sketch done in MyPaint (on Linux Manjaro XFCE on an old Del D820 laptop). Done as forced practice as I had not doodled in over a month. I started with no idea in mind just scribbling til I thought about a female figure – pose relaxed sitting – then the two creatures and finally the laser pistol.

I mentioned the linux distro Manjaro; it is a good distro for those using laptops with Nvidia GPUs. Other distros like Mageia also have out of box support for Nvidia GPUs. I will do a lot of ranting about Linux because I agree with a lot of the GNU-Free philosophical position. I also like the idea of there being creative software and operating systems that accessible to virtually anyone. Commercial software is often a barrier for those with limited budgets, so I will offer my knowledge and experience on using GNU and Linux OSs.

Special note for parents on tight budgets with kids wanting to delve into digital art. Old business type laptops are often a good starting point (example: Dell Latitudes). Reason is that they can often be had cheap – on Ebay and in decent shape. Getting one of these – minimum I recommend is 1st generation core2 duo. Going with hardware older then that can work but gets more difficult and you have less OS options. More on this and which OSs are a good starting point and one – like Emmabuntus which is a holistic family friendly distro. By that I mean it is loaded with apps to fit virtually every potential family member.

End first part of rant!

Part 2

Continuing on tips for parents on tight budget with creative kids. I mentioned that relatively cheap old business class laptops can be a good bargain when combined with a good Linux distro and GNU software. Good starting distros for new-comers would be Mint Linux, Korora Linux. Both are fairly strait forward and work out of box. If you have a desktop with a dedicated video card you can try Ubuntu Studio. Installing Linux is a bit different from Windows or Mac. You should look this up but just to give a good starting point – EXT4 with the boot set to “/” (forward slash) is a good safe choice for selecting what you want to format the drive in. You also need to have a swap drive space. This is a minimum set up. If you want to dual boot with Windows – have Windows installed and then install Linux. Make sure you keep Windows on one Primary partition. Then set up Linux as already described. A thing called Boot Grub will be installed which allows you to choose which to boot to at start up. Now the final price of the puzzle – Drawing tablet. Wacom is the big commercial maker – of expensive drawing tablets. There are alternative tablet manufacturers that produce good quality tablets for far less cost. I recommend Monoprice and Huion. Monoprice re-brands tablets from other manufactures. Huion’s venerable P608n is a great starting tablet. Just know that in Linux the basic pressure sensitivity is supported (if your tablet is supported), but not the buttons (as when you load drivers in Windows). The upshot is that the Huion, Monoprice (UCLogic), and UGEE M708 I have run better in Linux.

The above is a recent sketch also done in MyPaint (on Linux Peppermint on an old Del D430 laptop). Also a forced practice piece. The tablet used for this was my old beat up Huion P608n.

End rant part 2!

Next rant I might go into why closed source “fan boys” need to chill regarding open source – especially as most people’s lives are touched by open source via servers, and smart phones. yes that Android phone is Linux.

Below are two graphic illustrations I was hired to do – freelance. In both instances I used Inkscape. Interesting thing in this case I stayed within strict WC3 SVG standards so both graphics could be opened in web browsers that supported SVG – and they looked exactly as you see them.